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I am from

As I make more media that could be called journalism I feel that I need to avoid what media scholar Jay Rosen calls the view from nowhere. This is especially true since the music that I make, the projects I work on and the volunteering and organizing that I do come from my personal experience and exist within a social context. I’m consistently frustrated by political labels, especially ones that sit on an axis of left to right. The label radical as defined by Ella Baker, “getting down to and understanding the root cause”, is one description of consciousness and political action that still resonates with me:

I use the term “radical” in its original meaning – getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.

That is easier said than done. But one of the things that has to be faced is, in the process of wanting to change that system, how much have we got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going … I am saying, as you must say too, that in order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we have been, but must understand where we have been.”